MAY 2016CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8In My Opiniont a recent CIO summit on the topic of shrinking IT budgets, a CIO spoke up and said that board level discussions about IT governance should not be about how IT enables the business. Instead, the conversation needs to be reframed around how IT is the business. Aligning IT to strategically achieve business objectives involves more than just pursuing a seat at the table in making technology investment decisions or combating the proliferation of shadow IT. CIOs need to reposition IT through five levers defined by the IT Governance Institute: business strategic alignment, value delivery, risk management, resource management, and performance measurement.One key metric in realigning IT is the percentage of IT spend focused on "keeping the lights on" versus business innovation. With a number of IT organizations still having to support legacy homegrown applications, the ratio is frequently skewed in the wrong direction. Using the 80/20 rule--this often means that 80 percent of IT spend is focused on maintenance. The question becomes: how does IT balance the demands to drive operational efficiency and deliver technology innovation--all while managing costs?The answer: by leveraging an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system to automate, optimize and transform your business processes. "ECM enables organizations not just to digitize their document-based business processes but to optimize and reengineer them, transforming the way they work," states IDC's Melissa Webster, VP-Content and Digital Media Strategies.Thomas Phelps IV, CIO & VP-Corporate Strategy, LaserficheAECM, "the Dragon" to Deliver Business ValueIntegrating ECM without IT Application DevelopmentECM integrates with email and third party applications to quickly create workflows with multiple decision trees, electronic forms that auto-calculates numbers such as an insurance claim form or expense report, and digital signatures to sign documents on demand. A typical business user can configure, test, and deploy a new form, and the relevant process workflow, in just a few hours--without IT application development. And this is accomplished while ensuring appropriate policies, business rules and security controls are followed. Add in records management and audit trail that tracks every action--including who may have peeked at a sensitive document--and now you have a robust solution that also addresses regulatory compliance needs. Improving Security and ComplianceECM allows companies to reduce costs, reduce complexity, implement controls, and improve compliance in a highly regulated business environment. Healthcare payers and providers can enable their HIPAA compliance officer to track, manage and renew business associate agreements (BAAs) with vendors using metadata, document versioning, and workflow. Banks can ensure that appropriate controls and approvals for wire transfers are implemented and auditable using electronic approval forms and audit trail. Major motion picture studios can securely share their scripts and content with directors, actors, and post-production houses without fearing prelease content leakage on torrent services.
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